One reinforced-concrete blockhouse in the heart of the forest is manned, this winter of 1939/40, by Lieutenant Grange with three men, who live in a chalet built over it. Cut off from the rest of the world, their senses heightened to capture the sounds and smells of the forest, the men create their own security as autumn turns to winter. Later, though, when winter turns to spring, when the sap rises and the panzer divisions attack, Lieutenant Grange meets the fate he has never believed he would escape. But if this is a story of soldiers, it is not about fighting. It is about solitude, about watching and waiting - and about love, the young Lieutenant's devotion to Mona, the child-widow discovered like a sprite in the forest one rainy night, who, in this surreal period of suspense, becomes his lover.

    A soldier contemplates the mysterious paradoxes of human existence as he struggles to resolve a moral dilemma--how to correct an injustice while remaining an uninvolved spectator to the events as they unfold.

    a father of light', said Ezra Pound in 1918 of Jules Laforgue. Among the most innovative of poets in the French language, Laforgue was an important influence on the young T S Eliot. Part-symbolist and part-impressionist, his associative method, speech-rhythms and boldly heterogenous diction make him not only one of the most individual of French poets but also among the most entertaining. Notable also for his early protests for the liberation of women, Laforgue died in Paris in 1887 aged just 27. In this revised edition of his verse translation, Peter Dale (described by Donald Davie as an `exceptionally thoughtful and enterprising translator') captures the energy and panache of Laforgue's poetry in translations which are by turns as playful, wild, clear, obscure and impossible as the French poems. Peter Dale was born in Addleston, Surrey, and worked as a secondary school teacher before becoming a freelance writer in 1993. He was co-editor of the poetry journal Agenda for many years. Well known for his translations of Dante's Divine Comedy and the poems of François Villon, he is also an accomplished poet in his own right. His selected poems, Edge to Edge, was published in 1997.

    For this book is her testimony to the dignity and the courage of the human soul in the face of apparently unsurmountable obstacles. It is the story of one woman's attempt to retain her humanity in the midst of the most pervasive and obscene corruption the world has ever seen.